Last week I noted there had been a shift in American attitudes toward race. I described what the young adults were like in the early 1990s when I was in the U.S. Army and concluded their attitudes toward race gave an early indicator of the future of the country. Race remains an issue but matters less and less in people’s views. I said that future now has arrived. And I wondered why I hadn’t seen much in the way of media coverage about the shift.

Lo and behold I go to my mailbox and Newsweek dedicated an entire issue to the stuff I was talking about. It proves a point I often tell people: When they protest they haven’t seen what they want in the national media, it’s probably because they haven’t been looking hard enough for it. There is a lot of media out there. Surely some news outlet somewhere has covered the issue.

Newsweek spewed many engaging statistics. One paragraph of a story about race in America titled “Who We Are Now” was loaded with stats and backed up what I wrote last week.

“The new reality is reflected in the Newsweek Poll. Sixteen years ago, in the wake of the recession of 1991–92, anti-immigrant sentiment ran high, with 60 percent of Americans saying that they thought current immigration to the United States was a bad thing on the whole, and only 29 percent saying it was a good thing. Now the public is evenly divided, 44 percent to 44 percent. The percentage saying there are too many people coming to America from Africa has dropped from 47 percent in 1992 to 21 percent. Closer to home, public approval of interracial marriages (like the one between Obama’s parents) has risen significantly in the past decade, from 54 percent in 1995 to 80 percent today. The percentage of Americans who say they know a mixed-race couple has risen from 58 to 79 percent since 1995, and more than a third (34 percent) say they or a close family member have married or live with someone of another race or who has a very different racial, ethnic or religious background, including a quarter (24 percent) who say it is specifically an interracial marriage or live-in relationship.”

Bam. There you go.

Web development

If you’ve ever pieced together a puzzle, then you know it can be difficult to stop part way through the project. You become hooked on doing the puzzle. That’s how I feel about some web development skills I recently acquired.

I’m not just talking about surfing the Web. I’m talking about programming Web sites.

I mean, for a long time I could do some simple stuff: make a basic html page, make a link, embed a Google map, make words bold, change words, image-source a photograph and so forth.

But I had a gap between that knowledge and the next steps for making a really nice-looking site — not merely a basic html site. Before, I understood concepts but never had been taught the implementation. But now that I have better grasp of it all, I am in the ever-lasting trial-and-error process that is web development.

Try. Err. Try. Err. Try. Err. Try. Succeed.

Everyone who has ever touched the programming behind sites on the Internet has learned how to do it this way.

Read all the books you want. Scan all the helper blogs you want. Desperately search for all the instructions you want. Some small key that connects one step to another still won’t come together for some unmentioned reason. This forces you to find the answer in the same manner you would if you were in a dark basement trying to find the light-switch cord.

Oh, the reason the small step was unmentioned was because the instruction writer assumed it was a foregone conclusion. Someone looking over your shoulder would have said “Duh!” But no one is there to say “Duh!” though you wish there were.

Then you look up from your computer and it is 11 o’clock at night. You should be in bed. However, you won’t officially be a full-fledged World Wide Web geek until the night comes when you look up and it is 3 o’clock in the morning.

Now I am learning about cascading stylesheets, SQL databases, Django, JavaScript, PHP, XML, XHTML, WordPress, plugins, widgets, AJAX, dynamic versus flat, and so on, and I’m dying to get my hands on more knowledge. The hardest part is learning how to connect things together. There are about 50 different ways often to do the same function, and each Web developer has a preferred way of accomplishing it.

Best site ever for helping with “Duh!” stuff: www.w3schools.com.

Contrasts and balance

A friend of mine got me thinking about contrasts and balance lately. We had a religious discussion, and he was saying how the concepts have changed his views.

I’ve associated contrast as a design principal and writing tool for decades — but with religion is new. Bear with me here and forgive me ahead of time. I am generalizing. I mainly just want to spur your thoughts, too.

If God is all powerful, why would God allow Satan to exist? If there were no evil, would we not see good? If there were no Satan, would people not turn to God? Maybe the Earth is a balance of contrasts? Does God need Satan to keep that balance? Does good need evil?

I much more easily see a decoration on a table when it is the only decoration on the table. But when there are 10 decorations on the same table, I only notice a cluttered table, not the decorations. Contrasts help us see things.

When I was in the Army, some people joined the service because they wanted to go to war. They wanted to be tested. They wanted to face the frightening in order to display courage. Some people climb mountains. Some people take up a sport. Some people take great intellectual challenges, such as writing a book or starting a company. Contrasts are what people desire to improve themselves. They can be good for us. Jesus had the wilderness.

What’s my conclusion? There is none. I only have a few speculations. Like I said, I’m tossing this around my head lately. I suppose the conclusion could be — the entire world is made up of contrasts. Is that the case? I don’t know. You tell me.

Tribune Managing Editor Tim Engstrom’s column appears every Tuesday.